Thanks for pinging me @[email protected] (sounds like what people on Zhihu, the Chinese Quora, would say).

Points 1/5/6 about quality control, nepotism and mannerisms are about the same thing, that is whether you can generalize a few bad eggs to the entire group. My personal experience isn't going to be the same as someone next door, let alone someone from a different province, so the right place to look for answers is in statistics. I've heard the things you mentioned in these three points at least a decade ago, things have definitely become better is what I can tell you.

Point 2 about population, I'm part of the "young people who do not ~~want to~~ have kids", I strikeout the want to because I don't think people who don't want kids really mean it. I'm not a population expert so I'll pass on trying to estimate population numbers. Personally I think the cost of raising kids that some people mention mostly refers to the quality of education (which I'll mention below in point 4), and cost of living.

Point 3 about unemployment. "20% unemployment" is bogus talking point cooked up by Chinese liberal economists, here's the actual statistic they conjured this "data" from: http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202307/t20230715_1941276.html

Specifically, the surveyed unemployment rates of population aged from 16 to 24 and from 25 to 59 were 21.3 percent and 4.1 percent respectively

To anyone who can read, 21.3% unemployment refers to a narrow range of people from ages 16 to 24, but some liberals intentionally generalized it into the entire working population. Some economists went further and found a way to turn this 21.3% into around 50% unemployment.

Point 4 about education. Due to the large population of students and not enough resources to go around, there is definitely fierce competition among parents who want a better future for their kids. Note that I mention parents and not students, because I don't think most kids have the mental capacity or experience to understand what a better future is. Some parents go the extra mile and pay for tutoring outside of school to try to improve their kids' grades, this is understandable. But if all parents think like this, it's just going to come down to who is rich enough to employ better tutors on the market. Families who are not as well-off won't be able to compete if they also try to find tutors for their children. This is one of the reasons why tutoring for core subjects is banned, because the quality of education should not depend on how much capital a family can muster. There are also policies to reduce the amount of homework from school, can't comment on the effects as I don't have kids.

You don't need to have a positive impression of China, you can come here personally to see for yourself if you haven't, then form your own conclusions.

I can answer a couple of these. The whole population decline thing is largely overblown

• https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108900118
• https://asiatimes.com/2023/07/chinas-demographic-doomsayers-cite-the-wrong-data/

Meanwhile, the whole youth unemployment rate statistic is very deceptive as well because it counts from the age 16. While child labour is becoming normalized in US, kids are going to school in China. It's also worth noting that this is comparable situation to most European countries https://www.statista.com/statistics/613670/youth-unemployment-rates-in-europe/

1. "I have read stories about..." whose stories?

2. "there are reports of..." whise reports?

3. Who came up with the "20% unemployment" statistic?

4. The government banning private tuition om core subjects is part of a huge platform of education reforms, but you only ever hear about 'banning' and negative consequences. Do you really think they just banned tuition centers and won't do anything about attempts to evade the ban?

5. "From what I have heard and read" come on now. From what I have heard and read China is one of the few places where this kind of corruption gets punished.

6. Can you not see how this is just pure racism?

Apologies if my tone comes across as a bit harsh, but I find all of these points being framed as credible talking points insulting. The way China is constantly being held up against these vacuous economic and cultural benchmarks that other people aren't subjected to.

It's like "I've heard stories about how some people in China get really drunk in the evening and sing loudly and come to work with a hangover; what is the government doing about this?"

Or "There are reports that many couples in China get divorced after having children, forcing the children to be raised by single-parent families. Is the government doing anything to prevent relationships from souring?"

ping @[email protected]

On my phone so I'm just going to briefly chime in.

Population shrinking is indeed an issue but a few things are often ignored that should be noted. China is still urbanizing - 17% of the workforce are farmers compared to 2-3% in the advanced capitalist economies - so the urban workforce issue is less pronounced. Additionally, the newer workforce is much more educated than the earlier generations. China graduates something like 8x as many STEM students than the US, and will have nearly 2x the PhDs in a couple of years. Finally, there is a big push to automation.

The overworking of students is being combated. China banned after-school tutoring somewhat recently and there was a big hubbub about it online when it happened.

Corruption is also being combated. It's kind of Xi's whole deal and is why there's so much support for the central government now.

Manners question is kind of weird... From what I've heard on Twitter, Chinese citizens are much more trusting of each other now than a couple decades ago. I saw a graph showing the Chinese are some of the most trusting people in the world.

Found the data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes?tab=map

It seems like your standard to have "a positive impression of China" is only if it's somehow perfect and free from problems. Sure, the country has got issues. Like all countries do. And it's got a ton of positive points too, more than many countries in the world in fact. The world is a harsh place full of problems.

Item 6 is downright offensive. How "bad" are the rude people in any culture? Pretty bad. But do they represent the whole culture, even discounting the better-educated younger generation? No. There is high culture, the educated class, the warm hearted "real" people who may not have the most polished manners. There are normalized standard of politeness that everyone enjoys and upholds.

Why not consider how well the the Ugly American Tourist trope reflect the US as a whole. The infamous drunken Brits on all-night bashes trope, the Australian bogans trope. All kinds of folks from poorer countries who are "cheap" out of habit trope. And so on.

Quality control

Also interested, e.g. abundance of cheap fake “high-capacity” 8GB flash drives that claim to be 256gb or something

it is a fact right now that Chinese people have a 20% unemployment issue due to an abundance of university graduates without sufficient jobs to match this supply

Can you provide a source for that number?

For point 1, knowing a bit about QC and manufacturing with regard to China and history, I can provide a little anecdotal info. Yes, China has had issues with alleged "poor quality" products, but this is a problem in every country that newly industrializes. At first, countries that are new to the game provide a competitive price in labor compared to countries that industrialized earlier. Hell, you can go back over 100 years to Britain and you can read about complaints of British people that goods (textiles, etc) made in Germany are poor quality. Germany has since shook that reputation, and generally among the West is seen as a country with a high level of QC. Same thing with Japan. After WWII, Japanese goods were seen as poor quality, and it wasn't until the 80s/90s that Japan (specifically electronics) was seen as high quality and now still do quite well in that industry despite their years of economic stagnation. Even the USSR had issues with QC for various reasons throughout its existence.

My point is, that yes, China had a reputation of poor quality due to its late entry into mass industrial manufacturing, but it's a range and is shaking off that reputation it had in the 90s/early 2000s. Of course there are tons of cheap quality goods available online to consumers, but you get what you pay for. Many manufacturers have to worry about the bottom line. There are many high quality products coming out of China, electronics, trains, furnishings, you name it. It's all about specification and getting what one pays for, essentially. So next time you hear someone talking about 'poor quality Chinese goods', get them to show proof or else it's just Sinophobic bullshit lol.

Here's an article: https://insight-quality.com/quality-of-products-made-in-china/

To anyone wondering whether this user is acting in good faith or not, this user just called me a monkey.

Sorry everyone, I checked this user's account request due to a few reports and they should have never been let in. We deal with several account requests every day and only 1 or 2 admins actually go through them, so errors will happen once in a while. They've been banned.

I can understand some of the criticisms, but the population thing isn’t a big deal. They have the largest population on Earth in a country smaller than the US (barely), they’ve been working on the One Child Initiative for a while and the population is trending downward. I think it’s safe to say people would criticize the CPC a lot more if the One Child Policy was an abject failure. The Western Media is against One Child Policy because they can fear monger about it. They exaggerate the punishment of breaking it( a small fine) and propagandize around that issue because it’s an easy Catch-22. If China’s One Child Policy is successful, shit on the policy for being evil and causing a downward trend in population growth, if it’s unsuccessful, shit on the policy for being carried out poorly and call them backwards.